William Kentridge | Drawing Lesson One: In Praise of Shadows

William Kentridge presented the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 2012, entitled “Six Drawing Lessons.” Incorporating elements of graphic design and ranging freely from discussions of Plato’s cave to the Enlightenment’s role in colonial oppression to the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons is an illustration of its own thesis of how art creates knowledge. Foregrounding the very processes by which we see, Kentridge makes us more aware of the mechanisms—and deceptions—through which we construct meaning in the world.